She Misses Not Knowing

Fionnuala found out in a parking lot in February and the whole thing took about ninety seconds.

What she found out is not this article's business, and I am not going to invent a version of it, because whatever yours is, it will not be the same and it does not need to be. It was about a person she had loved and trusted for a long time. It was true. It was verified within a week. And there was never any question of it being a misunderstanding.

Everything after that has been correct. She left an arrangement she had been inside for years. She has been careful and calm and, in the opinion of everybody who loves her, remarkably steady. She is not in danger. She is not in the dark.

Here is what she cannot say.

She misses the woman she was on the morning of that day.

Not the ignorance, exactly. She would not undo the knowing; she has been offered, in a manner of speaking, the chance to disbelieve it and has refused it every time it came. But there was a person who got up that morning and made coffee and thought about what to have for supper, and that person did not exist by lunchtime, and Fionnuala misses her the way you miss somebody who died.

She has not said this to anyone because there is no way to say it that does not sound like she wishes she had never found out, and she does not wish that, and she cannot get the two things into one sentence.

Here is the day it caught.

Her friend, meaning nothing but kindness, said, "You know what, you're stronger than you were a year ago."

And Fionnuala said, "Thanks."

And walked home and thought: I did not want to be stronger. I wanted to be her.

You know that grief. Not for the thing you left. For the person you were before you knew what you now know, and the fact that there is no route back to her, and the fact that you would not take it if there were.

He tells God what he remembers

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you what you found out or hand anybody a verdict. I am not going to tell you what it was for, because I do not know and inventing a purpose for what somebody did to you is one of the worse things a person can do with a Bible. And I am not going to tell you how long this lasts.

What I will do is walk you through the most honest psalm in the book, because of the order it puts things in.

Psalm 42 is written by a man who is not all right. He says his tears have been his food day and night. And then he does this:

When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday.Psalm 42:4

Look at what he is grieving. Not a sin. Not a wrong done to him, at least not in that verse. He is grieving a memory of being somewhere with people, glad, in the middle of a crowd, before whatever happened to him happened.

He is not asking to go back. He is not proposing anything. He is telling God, in detail, what he remembers being like.

You are permitted to describe to God the person you used to be, and Psalm 42 is a man doing exactly that at length and without apology. Psalm 42:4 records the remembering as an act of pouring out rather than as a failure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen where somebody is standing with the kettle on.

And then, immediately after, he turns and speaks to himself:

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.Psalm 42:5

Notice he does not resolve the grief before he speaks hope to himself. The two sit next to each other in consecutive verses. He does not fix verse four in order to earn verse five. He says both.

You have not been asked to finish grieving before you may speak hope to yourself, and the psalm puts those two in adjacent verses on purpose. It is written that he poured out his soul and then told it to hope in God, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an unresolved grief and a spoken hope able to occupy the same person.

Knowing is not something to repent of

Now let me be careful, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Somebody will hear Fionnuala's story and want to say that knowledge is a gift, that ignorance was never really peace, that she is better off. All of which may be true in the long run, and all of which, said to a woman in month seven, functions as a demand that she stop grieving something real.

She lost a person. The person happened to be a version of herself. That is a genuine bereavement and it has no funeral and nobody sends a card.

You are grieving a real loss rather than indulging a wish, and Scripture never once asks a person to rank their losses before feeling one. Psalm 42:3 has him saying his tears have been his food day and night without a syllable of self-reproach, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an honest grief from being renamed as weakness.

And here is the sentence I most want to take off you. It is not the missing. It is the sentence you cannot get into one line, and the belief that because you cannot say it in one line it must be incoherent.

It is not incoherent. It is this: I would not choose to be blind again, and I am still grieving the woman who was.

Those two are both true. They are not in tension. They only feel that way because you have never been allowed to say them out loud in the same breath.

You are holding two true things rather than one confused thing, and the psalm holds the same pair across two verses without any strain at all. Psalm 42:4 and 42:5 stand side by side, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a person able to carry both without one canceling the other.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If February has left something heavier than sad, or if the steadiness everybody praises has been costing more than anybody knows, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about the person you left. That is me refusing to leave you at that table by yourself.